The other day I went to a local store to pick up a video game for my youngest daughter.Though she had reserved a copy, I was told there was a shipping problem and that the games would not arrive until later in the day or maybe even the day after.

So I called back that afternoon to see if the games had come in yet.They had.And, in fact, when I asked when they had arrived, I learned they had been there in the morning as well.It was only the collector’s edition that had been delayed.Unfortunately, the employee in the store I spoke to upon my visit there in the morning didn’t know what was going on.

I told this story to my oldest daughter who said she had similar experiences with other businesses.“But then,” she said, “maybe that’s just the way it is.You never know what’s going on when I ask you what is happening at church.”

She wasn’t being smart or mean in her answer; it was a simple observation innocently offered.But it hit home, and it hurt.I realized she was right.

I have always wanted to give people the freedom to do their thing.If everything has to run through me, I become a bottleneck to getting stuff done.That’s not my desire for my church, and I have no desire to be a micromanager.So I don’t always keep tight tabs on everything.

But being knowledgeable about my church and what is happening here is not necessarily the same thing as having to control it. When my daughter made the above comment, I realized how important such knowledge is—and how important it is that I make the investment of attention, time and energy needed to acquire it.

This is one of the reasons why this blog will most likely never be well read: I go for relatively long periods without posting. Perhaps even more to the point, I go through relatively long periods where I don't have anything to say!

Just finished celebrating a wedding. One unique aspect of this service was that after the Scripture reading in English, the same passage was then read again in French and Vietnamese.

Another interesting aspect was a question I was asked. In the Episcopal Church, we use the word "collect" as roughly synomous with the word "prayer". If you were to look at one of our typical Sunday services in the Book of Common Prayer, for instance, you would see a reference to the "Collect of the Day", which is really just the "Prayer of the Day".

Well, a family member of the wedding party who is not familiar with the Episcopal Church approached me with concern. He saw this word "Collect" in the wedding bulletin, and thought we would be using to the wedding as an opportunity to take a collection!

I never thought of it before, but that makes perfect sense. It's a great example of how what may be familiar to people within the church may be unfamiliar, and frankly off-putting, to people outside the church.

Though it is perhaps a fine line, I’d suggest that when a passion becomes all consuming it ceases to be a passion and becomes an obsession.I’d also suggest that is not a Good Thing.

It seems to me that obsessions tend to make people think the life they have is not the life they want.Obsessions, by their very nature, drive us towards wanting more of something, so that it is hard to appreciate what we already have.

Is that a bad thing?Can’t such unrelenting discontent compel a person to outstanding achievement?Aren’t the people in the world who are best at what they do people whose passions have given way to “magnificent” obsession so that they become singular in their thinking and calling?

Perhaps.

But obsessions, I think, remove the subtlety and nuance from life.And because life so often is both subtle and nuanced, obsession has a way of removing us from life rather than letting us participate more fully in it.It pushes us out of the grand flow so that we get stuck off in an eddy on the side, or a whirl pool that spins us in endless circles even as it pushes us further and further down.

That is all the more true of people and relationships.People and relationships are complicated things, very rarely wholly good or wholly evil or wholly anything for that matter.Obsessions push us into corners where we loose sight of that, and so create caricatures of those who differ from us.We then feel free to treat them with less compassion, honor, and respect than the real people deserve.

Sometimes obsessions cause us to loose sight of people altogether.

Most of all, I think obsession destroys choice. I said in my previous post that I don’t think we pick our passions so much a recognize them.But we do choose whether or not we will pursue them, and if so to what length.

In the grip of merciless, unfulfilled desire, obsession takes that choice from us.It simply drives us ever on, helpless before it.

As you may or may not know, today is officially All Saints Day.In the simplest of terms, it’s a day where we give thanks for God’s children who have shaped our lives and given us hope.

When we think of saints, many people think of men and women whose “goodness quotient” is off the charts.These are people who seem so much better than we are that being a saint simply seems unattainable.

Or perhaps we think of people who are just plain weird, who have done things that seem strange and bizarre to us (like sitting on top of a pole for 30 years or living alone in a cave).In this regard, the idea of being a saint can seem undesirable.

But in the oldest Christian traditions, the ones most directly shaped by Jesus, a saint was simply an ordinary everyday person like you or like me who, in being faithful to God, was enabled to love others in extraordinary ways.They were not perfect, and often had their quirks and idiosyncrasies.But they did care about people enough to devote themselves, with God’s help, to be bold in changing the World That Is into The World That Was Meant to Be.

I do thank God for the saints in my life; for the people who have loved me through thick and thin, who have stuck with me even when there was no good reason to do so (and sometimes good reason not to), who have believed in me even when I could no longer believe in myself, and who even in the passing of years and accumulation of miles between us have not forgotten me.

In them I have caught glimpses of the depths of God’s love, and have experienced the unparalleled beauty of His grace.Some I love but see no longer; others are still very much a part of my life.Both groups, however,are remembered this day, and held dear in my heart.